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When bloggers turn into the demon they sought to destroy

Life's better with a couple of filters?

Our friend over at Fashionicide wrote this brilliant post recently. Hop over and read. Then come back. And it got me thinking.

When I first started reading blogs (a very long time ago) I did so because I could identify with them on a level. Agreed there was very little representation if you were not white, but I could still identify with them. They had had enough of airbrushed to perfection celebrities. Or of adverts of mascara shot with false lashes (as Lima puts it *this advert may not even be shot with the mascara we want to sell to you), and they had enough of magazines *recommending* products that were sent to them for free and most often paid to push on us. This breed of bloggers had one goal; to show what products looked like on real people. Fast forward to now and I don't read so many blogs anymore (or watch YouTube for that matter).

Blogging has done a 360 degrees turn and has become what it wanted to change;The media's portrayal of one standard of unattainable beauty. Apps are used to airbrush skin to beyond perfection. All the *major* beauty bloggers look the same. No matter what their ethnicity. Everyone is doing the same highlight, contour and baking routine. Watching some of these peoples "everyday" make up look is enough to make some people stay at home and not be seen in public.

This isn't about bashing makeup. I love makeup. I love buying it, looking at it, and wearing it. I love extremely contoured looks. I love false lashes. I love drag makeup; my drag name would be Bambi.

What this is about is that these "non celebrity" girls have become a new standard of beauty. And at least with celebrities it was known that the airbrushing happened. We knew there was a team of 10 people making our favourite celebrities looking the way the did. We knew that even Beyonce in real life didn't look like Beyonce in the magazines. We knew that this ideal of beauty was unattainable.

What makes beauty bloggers different is they claim to be just like you and me. Normal girls. Yet a quick scroll across their Instagram platforms is enough to make us question our own sanity. If these normal girls can look this flawless while running errands then that surely we should all be able to achieve this perfect look too?

This doesn't affect me because I've always been headstrong and never cared about what the world says I should believe in. But it saddens me when I see young girls who are unable to step out to the supermarkets without a full face of makeup which would rival that of those in Rupals Drag Race. Seeing school aged girls on the bus on their way to school is heartbreaking. They all look the same, the amount of makeup on their faces is unreal. Wearing false lashes in school is now a norm. It's sad that girls have to equate confidence with hiding their own skin.

Makeup is empowering. I know I feel better when I wear makeup. I'm a different person when I'm slaying my winged liner (just don't cross me okay?) Concealer is my best friend. But since when is using makeup to hide yourself normal?

Note Alicia Keys' stand on no longer wearing makeup. She dared to attend the MTV awards with no make up. The blogging world uproared with how not wearing makeup is not empowering, about how she can get away with it because she doesn't have bad skin or acne marks, about how she's not sending the right message, about how she's shaming people who wear makeup. But wearing makeup (or not wearing it)should be a choice. It shouldn't be forced upon us as a beauty standard.

Women with makeup are pretty. Women without makeup are also pretty. Women who are confident, kind and smart are beautiful.

It's nice to follow Instagram accounts where each photo is perfection. I find that I do it too. And then I spend a lot of time questioning why don't my photos look like that, or why doesn't my absolutely flawless makeup up in real life doesn't photograph well, or why I don't have the most picturesque backdrops so my ootds would look amazing. What we don't get told by these *normal* girls are that it's not real for them either. It's not their houses they are posing outside. Not their roads. They've spent 1-2 hours doing their "everyday" face routine. They have professional photographers taking their photos, they've filtered the shit out of their pictures. Maybe she's born with it? No, she's used 3 different apps.

I watched a popular beauty guru post a video on her best Instagram tips. She likes her feed to look a certain colour (grey in her case) so she admits she actually physically colour the objects in the picture grey using FaceTune. Her pictures are not a reflection of her real life.

When you have to spend hours to contour you nose so it looks 'thin, long and pointy' with a glowing highlight at the tip and not wide, crooked or real, maybe stop and think that there's something wrong there. You are beautiful, your imperfections are what make you unique and special. Why do you want to look the same as every other girl? Why shouldn't a wonky nose be considered beautiful too? Beauty is everywhere, and there shouldn't be one ideal.

There's a very distinct difference between beauty gurus and real make up artists on YouTube and Instagram. You'll notice real makeup up artists (e.g the likes of Lisa Eldridge) celebrates diversity and differences whereas beauty gurus/bloggers are more or less cookie cutters of one another, showing how to look like a universal beauty no matter what ethnicity.

Wear makeup, or don't wear makeup, just do you! Make it your choice. Break the beauty rules, make your own shit up. Be true to yourself.

On that note here is what I look like on a daily basis:

Ciao ;)

share your thoughts and comments below.

#filterfree #makeupfree #naturalbeauty

5 comments

Love this post - it rings so true unfortunately and also is somewhat ironic that the reason for the birth of blogging, will also be the ultimate reason for the death of it. Maybe in the blogging after-life, things will go back to the way they once were. But for now, I guess we'll have to deal with the cookie-cutter blandness, and hunt out the genuine good eggs.